Thomas Edward Brown.

By SELWYN G. SIMPSON.

1. Introduction.

To the north-west of England, in the Irish Sea, lies an Island. An Island insignificant
as regards size, and one which might be disregarded were it not that it still
retains its ancient customs, laws, and habits. The British Parliament has no
representative from the Isle of Man; and no laws passed by this assembly affect
the Island unless special provision is made therein. The Island is ruled by
a Governor, an Upper Chamber, and that historical House of Keys-one of the oldest
legislative assemblies in the world. Even these facts would have but meagre
interest for an outsider were it not that trey, as also the gradually disappearing
traditions of the inhabitants, have been preserved in verse by one of her sons.
If Browning be right when he contends that facts are only permanent when they
are preserved in artistic way, then may we be sure that the Manx traditions
will for ever live in the poetry of T. E. Brown. His verse has all the marks
of true poetry, sincerity and vivacity, emotion and observation, metre and rhythm;
and, above all, he is singing of a land and people, habits and customs, never
before extolled in verse, and he is singing with a brilliance of originality
that enhances and vivifies his theme.

His "Yarns" have been compared with Crabbe's Tales, but oh ! what a difference!
The Manxman, with an observation just as penetrating as that of Crabbe, describes
every scene in the daily life of his countrymen, and leaves us with a pleasant
remembrance of them in our minds. Crabbe minutely paints the lives of the poor;
but with so unrelenting a touch that we shiver and turn to some more pleasing
subject. Brown has also been compared with Burns. He has much in common with
the Scotch bard. In both a humour, pathos, observant knowledge, and sympathetic
joy are to be discovered. Each poet has an abounding humanity and peculiar originality
that leavens all his work. Then the Manxman, like the Scot, has to fight against
the prejudices of readers who will not trouble to master a dialect. The Manx
dialect, however, presents no real difficulty. His writing in dialect is no
reason to condemn him unread. Who is there, who has any pretensions to literary
taste, who does not prefer "Tam o' Shanter" to all the poems that Burns wrote
to please an Edinborough aristocracy? It is just this use of Manx syntax and
prosody that makes Brown's verse so living and true. He wrote ;n dialect because
he was writing primarily for his own people. His first object in composing the
" Yarns" was to " please his countrymen"

To unlock the treasures of the island heart;
With loving feet to trace each hill and glen,
And find the ore that is not for the mart
Of commerce.

He saw the change that was coming over his beloved Island, and so tried to
" fix upon the page" all that was left "of ancient heritage, of manners, speech,
of humours, polity," of the Manx nation; so that " the coming age may see. as
in a glass" all that their forefathers had held dear. He wrote in dialect because
it was engraven on his heart and was bound up with every Earliest and dearest
of his associations. Before turning to study his works we shall do well to review
the outline of his life. .

Thomas Edward Brown, the third son (the sixth of ten children) of the Rev Robert
Brown and Dorothy his wife, was born on the fifth of May, 1830, in New Bond-street,
Douglas. His father was a stern evangelical clergyman, whose highest words of
praise were " That will do, sir," or " Go on, sir." But though he was usually
stern and undemonstrative, there was a sensitive tenderness, an allembracing
humanity and a pathetic emotion in his character that especially shewed themselves
in his dealings with his parishioners, and found vent in his sermons, as we
learn from the words the poet puts into the mouth of Old John:Oh I tell him
that you once to me confessed

That, all the varied modes of rhetoric trying,
You ever liked the maister's sermons best
When he was crying.

His mother was of Scotch extraction, though born in the Isle of Man. She was
a great reader, and had an unusually strong and masculine wit, and humorous
originality, restrained by a strong practical common sense. The influence of
both his parents was very great on their son. From his father he gets a sobriety
and classical exactitude; whilst his originality, wit, and racy humour came
to him from his mother. But he was influenced even more by an old Scotch domestic
who had been for many years in the family. It was to "Old John" that the poet
owes his first love for Nature. Just at the moment when the " flexile aptness"
of his years was most prone to be trained, "Old John" indexed for him the book
of Nature. He did even more; by explaining Scott's tales to the imaginative
boy, he grafted in his mind the wish to write and so preserve the fleeting traditions
of his own land. Nor was that all that the poet learned from his intercourse
with this "dear, brave, old Scotchman; he also learned

To look beyond convention's flimsy trammel,
And see the native tints, if anywise,
Of God's enamel.

When Brown was two years old, the
family removed to Kirk Braddan. The
house in which they lived has been pulled
down and a new vicarage built in its
place. But the natural surroundings
remain, and we can picture the view of
the fields, the sea, and Douglas Head that
must have met the poet's gaze.

As a boy, Brown was timid and shy, and showed none o: that brilliant wit, vivacity
and geniality that so distinguished him as a man. But notwithstanding his shyness,
a shyness that never really left him, he lived, by choice, in the centre of
the family. His early education was of a most unique character. Until the age
of fourteen he was taught at home by his father and Lho village schoolmaster.
His father, being partially blind, employed his son constantly in reading to
him. In this way Brown read widely, grave and gay, from Moaheim's Church History
to Byron's poems In 1845, when he was 15 years old, he entered King William's
College, near Castletown, in his native Island. Two years later, he carried
off the second prize for English verse; the first being taken by the late Dean
Farrar. It was about this time that he began to write poetry. He did not join
in the school games; but is spoken of, by his fellow-students, as being a "
manly, vigorous boy." He devoted his holidays to long rambles with his companions,
during which their lovely surroundings, literature, politics, history, or theology
formed the subjects of their conversation. He had at this time, as throughout
his life, a strong sense of humour, with a keen eye for any little peculiarity
of voice or accent or manner. It is to be feared that he used his power of mimicry
rather too freely. This keenness of observation renders his poems so true to
life, and made it possible for Canon Wilson to say, in the obituary notice in
the Times " The writer of this note has heard the most brilliant lecturers,
from Faraday downwards, but could put none in the same rank with Brown." In
October, 1849, Brown went " as a servitor," to Christ Church College, Oxford.
In November, he was elected to a Boulter Scholarship; and in 1853 he was placed
in the First Class in Litteris Humanioribus. In the following December he gained
a First Class :n the Law and History School. This last success placed him in
a unique position in the University. He occupied the same position-that of being
the first Double First-with regard to the new system as Mr Robert Peel had done
to the old. In 1854 he was elected Fellow of Oriel. in those days an Oriel Fellowship
kept and conveyed a peculiar distinction; and at last the young scholar had
the ball at his feet. But he did not like the University life; and refused Gladstone's
offers of political work, in order to go back to his native Island. In 1856
he was appointed Vice-Principal of his old school-King William's College. His
life, at this period, was not entirely taken up with his scholastic duties;
be started night schools for the fisher lads, and tried to improve the singing
in the various churches in the South of the Island. He also delivered instructive
lectures in Castletown and the neighbourhood. In 1857 he married his cousin,
Miss Stowell. He left Castletown in 1860, and was appointed to the Headship
of the Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester. The school was at the lowest ebb when
he came and he was expected to create a tradition. The governing body was against
his innovations. The boys were of the stamp of the one who protested to the
master in charge of the cricket, on being senit out to field, in these terms,
" Look ere, sur, r hat I wants to know is, when'll it be my turn to knawk?"
His stay at Gloucester has, at least, one predominant fact of interestMr W.
E. Henley was his pupil. That great critic, who published most of Brown's later
work in the " National Observer," opined that it was his teaching that opened
to him ways of thought and speech; that coming like a call from the great, quick,
living world, discovered hint the true materials and beginnings of himself.
Brown did not stay long in this uncongenial atmosphere. He went to Clifton as
second master in 1853. There he stayed for nearly thirty yeas; years strikingly
void of incident for the chronologer, but a time of immense interest to his
friends and pupils. The one fact that strikes the student of this period is
that Brown, though happy in his home and work, was always looking forward to
his final return to the Isle of Man. His heart was ever in the "in the Island
in the sea." He voices his feelings in his poem untitled "Clifton," where he
alternately expresses the dreariness of the life at Clifton and his thankfulness
at the thought of the charms of has own sweet land. That these were no idle
expressions is proved by the fact that, during all the twenty-nine years he
was at Clifton, he never missed returning to the Isle of Man once, at least,
in every twelve months. His life at Clifton was saddened by family bereavements.
In 1876 his son died of scarlet fever. In 1886 his brother, Hugh Stowell Brown,
died. And in 1888 he was called upon to bear the greatest of all blows-the death
of his wife. He left Clifton in July, 1892, and went to his native land; not
to take up any position -indeed he refused the office of Archdeacon in 1894-but
to live a free life amongst the people and scenes he loved so well. He only
enjoyed this peaceful freedom for five years. He died, whilst giving an address
to the boys in one of the houses in Clifton, on October 29th, 1897. He was laid
to rest in the Redland Green Churchyard, beside his wife and his boy Braddan.
But though his body is buried in English ground, we may believe that his spirit
still haunts the glades and glens of the Island so dear to him, or seeks the
future Manx poet in " the bowers where Plato marked the virgin souls desiring
the birth-call of the ripening hours."

Turning to his works, we find that the year 1873 is, as it were, a flowering
time. The poet was then 43 years old-an age when many singers have nearly ceased
to sing-but that year saw the publication of his first poem, "Betsy Lee," and
also marks the commencement of a vein of letter-writing, absolutely natural
and without self-consciousness, yet indicating a brilliant power of observation
and a highly developed spirit of criticism.

Brown's poems may be divided into two
classes. His poems in English, which are
chiefly subjective expressions of natural,
philosophical, or religious ideas; and his
verse in the Anglo-Manx dialect, which is
in the form of tales collected under the
title of the " Fo'c's'le Yarns," and contains a complete picture of Manx life.

Let us deal with his English verse first.
Our author treats his subjects-God, Man,
and Nature from his own special point
of view, which' is a threefold one, as he
expresses in the last three verses of his
poem "Pain." To understand his works
completely, we must understand the man
himself from this threefold point of view
-moral, intellectual, and spiritual. In
Brown, the spiritual life governs the
other two. He is, however, a moralist.
We may see how his spiritual side shows
itself in the impressionist picture he gives
us of the transmutation of sin, evil, and
ugliness to the loveliness and light of
another life in the poem entitled "The
Schooner"- `

Just mark that schooner westward far at sea
'Tis but an hour ago
When she was lying hoggish at the quay,
And men ran to and fro,
And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed, and swore,
And ever and anon, with crapulous glee,
Cringed homage to viragoes on the shore.
So to the jetty gradual she was hauled
Then one the tiller took,
And chewed, and spat upon his hand, and bawled;
And one the canvas shook
Forth like a mouldy bat; and one, with nods
And smiles, lay on the bowsprit-end, and called
And cursed the harbour-master by his gods.
And, rotten from the gunwale i o the keel,
Rat-riddled, bilge-bestank,
Slime-slobbered, horrible, I saw her reel, and drag her oozy flank,
And sprawl among the deft young waves that laughed,
And leaped, and turned in many a sportive wheel,
As she thumped onward with her lumbering draught.
And now, behold ! a shadow of repose Upon a line of grey,
She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose -
She sleeps and dreams away, Soft-blended in a unity of rest,
All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes,
Neath the broad benediction of the west
Sleeps; and methinks she changes as she sleeps,
And dies, and is a spirit pure.
Lo ! on her deck an angel pilot ke ps
His lonely wstch secure; And at the entrance of heaven's dockyard waits,
Till from night's leash the fine-breath'd morning leaps,
And that strong hand within unbars the gates.

His treatment of Nature is very real
and personal. He has a Wordsworthian
interest in x).11 that belongs to her; and
he rivals Scott in vividness of natural
colouring and description. Three aspects
are particularly in evidence

1. The personality of Nature.
2. The silence of Nature.
3. The grandness of Nature.

1. Brown had a " kind and degree of sympathy with external nature that separated
him from other men," said one of his friends. This is largely shewn in his poems.
He seems to see in his natural surroundings a living and pervading spirit. They
are not to him merely streams or trees; but the stream contains a living feeling
centre, and every branch of the tree represents a separate being, forming a
part of the whole. The lines in which he tells of the short-lived Irish burn
are tinged with sadness; and his description of a bough of May is brightly realistic
in its portraiture of the arrogance of the graceful tree:

I bended unto me a bough of May,
That I might see and smell
It bore it in a sort of way.
It bore it very well.
But, when I let it backward sway,
Then were it hard to tell
With what a toss, with what a swing,
The dainty thing
Resumed its proper level,
And sent me to the devil.?
I know it did-you doubt it
I turned, and saw them whispering about it.

2. The silences of Nature are often to
be found ;n his Letters and Poems,
causing us a tender melancholy. The
poem entitled "The Dhoon" gives us one
view of this stillness, and the mere lyrical
sigh, "Weary Wind of the West," skews
us another.

3. The grandness of Nature also finds
many expressions in his poetry. " Triton
Esuriens" and many other of the poems
shew this feature in a marked way. In
reading Brown, one gets the idea that his
inner life was of a larger mould than
those of ordinary mortals. Great forces
had an especial attraction for him-the
illimitable sea, the generating sun,
forgiveness and. love.

But now to turn to the "Yarns," for it is here that we get the, national poet;
it is by them that his fame will live; to them will men look in future years
when they want a picture of the bygone habits and customs of the Manx people.
They are called " F'o'c's'le Yarns" because they are told by an old sailor-Tom
Baynes. Brown only uses the old sailor for descriptive purposes. As he says:
" Tom Baynes -that is myself. I never stopped for a moment to think what Tom
Baynes would say-he simply is I " This old salt tells the ten stories to an
imaginary audience of sailors in the fo'c's'le, whose presence is made known
to us by the narrator stopping for an instant to correct or argue with one of
the otherwise silent and invisible auditors. Readers of the Yarns will soon
be delighted with their insight into Manx life.

Brown's Character Studies.

Brown's poems are, as it were, the abridged type of the entire Manx nation.
His keen intellectual observation and his inherent sympathetic understanding
gave him a searching power of analysis, which enabled him to make living portraits.
His characters are not types. They are not human summaries or intuitive perceptions
of types; but people we know; whose whole biography lies open before us. This
is an excellent criterion to know it a character has been drawn with power.
His characters, however, though not originally types, become types, because
they are true, and because the public is able to know them sufficiently well
for them to enter into its daily life.

Brown had an amazing power of undewstanding other people from their own positions.
He feels the ever-raging battle that is the justification of each indivi duality.
He grasps the reality of the various points of view held by the different classes
that form mankind. He realises that all persons have their own points of -view
and separate individualities. Consequently, his creations bear the stamp of
truth in the highest degree. He saw the person he described from the reality,
with such perfect clearness, that he continued to live in his brains as a living
picture. The poet, therefore, never has to shew us the secret springs that are
at work behind his creation. He continued to regard his character and the person
continued to act in accordance with the movements the author had observed in
the reality. This conformity of the character with the reality makes his portraits
absolutely true. For this reason, Brown gives no moral analyses. His characters
move and speak just as those we meet every day. He leaves the work of analysis
to the reader and the critic. It is just this that one calls having " le sens
de la vie." The reason that se manv writers fail to draw living portraits is
because they read men and women from their own book. Many writers can create
mental figures, very few figures that really live. This is the consequence of
their endeavouring to make their creations individual as individuals and nothing
more, instead of making them the expression of an individuality as affected
by age, time, sex, environment, and all the other forces that go to form the
impersonal complexity of manhood or womanhood. Then Brown's characters are affected
not only by their daily surroundings, but also by the part of the Island in
which they live. The people in the North differ considerably fronn those who
dwell in the South. Brown was a Southerner. His early works were pictures of
the habits and the customs of the South. When he returned to the Island in later
life, he was living in the North. This fact explains the difference between
the characters in his earlier and later works. One has but to read " Betsy Lee"
and "Job the White" to realise the distinction. Certain characteristics are
to be found in all his portraits. Manliness is their keynote. Sentimentalism,
effeminacy, sham, are abhorred by him. Unreality and hypocrisy, in every form,
meet with his sternest condemnation. These few preliminary remarks will have
placed before you in outline Brown's system of character study.

It will be well to examine a few of his figures in the light of their actual
existence, so as to see, by tracing their development, how our author has read
the tangled scroll of complex humanity-to obtain, by following their instinctive
and natural evolutions, an insight into his observation of the surrounding reality.
Then, such a study is advisable in order to grasp the sense of atmosphere that
ought to pervade and colour the picture. It is, of course, true that such a
rapid examination, as this must be, will but imperfectly fulfil this purpose,
but it may serve to bring to light the general qualities of Brown's portraits.
The difficulty of selection has, however, to be faced. To which portrait, in
the noble gallery contained in the "Yarns," ought the preference to be given?
Each has its own individuality, and is notably true to it.-elf; but is not typical
of the poet's aims. Characters such as " Pazon Gale," `Tom Baynes," " Tommy
Big Eyes," "Captain Tom and Captain Hugh" are all fascinating. and are all living
representatives of various phases of everyday life. Or again, "Jack Pentreath
and Harry Creer," in the "Manx Witch," are excellent in the true vivacity of
their Manx character and feelings. But none of these are typical of his aim.
Perhaps the most suitable figures for this purpose are--as the hero-" The Doctor,"
and--as the villain-".Cain." These two seem the best suited to represent our
author's general grasp of personality in the midst of the many problems that
surround it from day to day.

The " Yarn " entitled " The Doctor " must be recognised as Brown's master piece.
Max Muller spoke of it " as if not one of the best hundred books of the world,
yet as one in which the vividness of imagination and language and of sympathy
surprised him." The " Yarn" was first published in 1885 in the "Isle of Man
Times." It belongs, therefore, to his later poems, and contains a note of sadness
not to be discovered in his earlier efforts. We feel that the poet has passed
through sorrow; that he regards the world as knowing the underlying sadness
of life The keynote of the whole poem is the powerlessness of intellect to save
a man, and the might of love. Throughout, the ability and learning of "The Doctor"
are treated as most precious and most salutary; but we are shown their impotence
to sustain him when overtaken by trouble and despair; and just as the abrupt
end of his first love affair drives him to ruin, so the love for his daughter
Kitty saves him and enables him to regain some of his lost manliness. We can
follow the Doctor's career through all its varying stages. We find him a young
practitioner in London. A certain baronet takes a fancy to him and has him daily
to attend at his house. The baronet has an only daughter, with whom Dr Bell
falls in love. At a ball in Sir John's ...